Routing and Localization Services in Self-Organizing Wireless Ad-Hoc and Sensor Networks Using Virtual Coordinates

Large scale wireless ad-hoc networks of computers, sensors, PDAs etc. (i.e. nodes) are revolutionizing connectivity and leading to a paradigm shift from centralized systems to highly distributed systems. A plethora of routing algorithms have been proposed to support path discovery into this class of networks, ranging from broadcasting/flooding approaches to global positioning systems (GPS). W-Grid is a novel infrastructure whose self-organizing routing and localization services enable message routing and data management without reliance on flooding/broadcasting operations or GPS. The resulting ad-hoc network does not suffer from the dead-end problem, which occurs in geographic-based routing when a node is unable to locate a neighbor closer to the destination than itself. As an example of data management we present a location service that allows a device to send messages to any another node without knowing its position. Extensive performance analysis and experiments have been conducted, and the results compared to GPSR, which is considered to be the most efficient solution not using broadcast operations but exploiting nodes' position. Analyses show that the difference between the performance of our approach and GPSR is minimal and therefore very interesting, since no GPS is used